Scam continues: Thousands of new-build houses are still being sold with leaseholds

Thousands of new-build houses are still being sold with leaseholds, despite a Government pledge to ban the arrangement a year ago – many of them under the Government's own Help to Buy scheme.

Last December, Housing Secretary James Brokenshire described the practice of developers selling on freeholds to third parties who then bumped up annual ground rents by as much as tenfold as 'unscrupulous and unjustified'.